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Seriously now, is there any benefits to using ZFS or btrfs over ext3 or even ext 4 or even XFS as a desktop filesystem?

I highly doubt I will ever use ZFS unless the distro's installer offers it during the partitioning process.

People using ZFS on desktops usually report that their desktop environments are more responsive, which can be attributed to the ARC algorithm. There are numerous other benefits, but I imagine that most desktop users are only interested in interactive response.

As for installer support, it is coming.

Edit: I probably should add that people who use Con Kolivas' BFS to improve interactive response will love ZFS. The primary reason why BFS is effective lies not in providing more CPU time, but avoiding cache flushes associated with changes in workload. ZFS' ARC algorithm is scan resistant, which eliminates the problem entirely. People using ZFS likely will see no benefit from BFS.

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Linux is a great piece of technology and it is free and open source.
ZFS is a great piece of technology and it is free and open source.

It is just so sad that we can't integrate it mainline due to license incompatibilities.

License proliferation is harming the free open source software community.

Nothing is harming each other. There are different licenses and we have to live with this. Keep in mind there are proprietary licenses which are the worst and Open Source must be protected against them. As for the zfs on Linux it's great news.

Comment

Linux is a great piece of technology and it is free and open source.
ZFS is a great piece of technology and it is free and open source.

It is just so sad that we can't integrate it mainline due to license incompatibilities.

That was a deliberate decision from SUN when they were losing their market share against Linux system especially IBM and Red Hat.
As a result, binary ZFS on Linux cannot legally included out of box nor integrated into Linux kernel. When Oracle will decide to change ZFS license for GPL compatibility (unlikely), then it can. For now, ZFS is a legal minefield that out-weights its technical merit.

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That was a deliberate decision from SUN when they were losing their market share against Linux system especially IBM and Red Hat.
As a result, binary ZFS on Linux cannot legally included out of box nor integrated into Linux kernel. When Oracle will decide to change ZFS license for GPL compatibility (unlikely), then it can. For now, ZFS is a legal minefield that out-weights its technical merit.

This is completely wrong.

Sun wanted a license that was like the GPL, but was friendly to binary drivers from third parties.

Oracle is not able to relicense ZFSOnLinux. There are numerous other copyright holders that would also have to agree. Many of them would reject this idea because it would pose problems for code sharing between different implementations.

There are no legal hurdles preventing Linux distributions from shipping binary ZFS modules. I had a meeting about this last year with one of the Gentoo trustees. Our meeting concluded that shipping binary ZFS modules is okay. That is why the Gentoo Foundation is shipping binary ZFS modules on its Live DVD. Other distributions are also beginning to ship ZFS on their install media. The only thing that prevented this from happening sooner was lack of man power. It takes a great deal of effort to integrate a new filesystem into a distribution when you are the first one to do it.

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Have been using ZoL for about a year now for bulk storage and VM backing (cloned ZVOLs are fantastic for this), and whilst there were some configuration-related teething problems when I first started, my patches were accepted, and it's been smooth sailing since. The recent decision for the open implementations (Illumos/FreeBSD/Linux/etc) to do away with version numbers and instead use a feature matrix is a great idea, and should make collaboration much easier, as features will be able to be implemented in parallel.

The two major features I'm keen to see implemented though are encryption, and libvirt support (for snapshots, volumes, clones, etc), (the former being difficult since it needs to be cross-platform compatible, and the latter being problematic because there seems to be little interest in supporting additional filesystems/volume-managers in libvirt). I may try implementing libvirt support at some stage if it doesn't happen, but it's a big job, since it needs to touch a lot of layers (probably all the way down to QEMU for full support).